A republic torn into two camps

Stand in front of it. The montage is large, about three feet nine inches tall by two feet eleven inches wide (roughly 114 by 90 centimeters), a portrait-shapedsheet, taller than it is wide, near poster size and one of the biggest photomontages anyone in Berlin Dada made. (You will sometimes see it listed as “144 cm” or with the width and height flipped; those are transcription slips. The long side is about 114 centimeters, and the work stands taller than it is wide.) The first impression is overwhelming: dozens of cut-out heads, bodies, gears, wheels, words, and machine parts packed edge to edge, a kaleidoscope that looks, at a glance, like pure chaos.

It is not chaos. It only performs chaos. Spend a minute and an organization rises out of it. The picture is built as a map of two warring camps, and once you see the division you cannot un-see it. The cut-out words “dada” and “anti-dada” act as labels, sorting the figures into two sides, with the knife’s cut running as a rough diagonal from the lower right up to the upper left between them. One half is the old order; the other is the revolution. Everything in the picture belongs to one team or the other.

The “anti-dada” camp, the establishment, gathers in the upper right. Its anchor is a large head of the deposed emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Höch has played her best joke on him: his famous upturned moustache has been snipped away and replaced with a pair of tiny upside-down wrestlers, two cut-out strongmen standing in for the bristling whiskers of imperial authority. Around him cluster the men of the old empire and the new republic, generals and government officials, the field marshal Paul von Hindenburg among them. (Scholars who have mapped the picture closely, above all the art historian Maud Lavin, read Hindenburg’s head as set onto a belly-dancer’s body, one of Höch’s recurring tricks of sticking a pompous man’s head on an absurd body. Take that exact pairing as a careful scholarly reading, not a label printed on the work; the picture is dense, and some of the identifications are interpretation.)

The “dada” camp, the revolution, spreads across the lower left and through the picture. Here are the Communists and radicals: Lenin, the founder of the new Soviet state; Karl Marx; the murdered Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht; the Bolshevik Karl Radek. Here too are the Dadaists themselves, Hausmann, Grosz, Herzfelde, Baader, the men of Höch’s own circle, planted firmly on the side of the cut. And nearby floats Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity had just made him world-famous, standing in for modern science as another force overturning the old certainties. The division of the picture into these two camps is certain; some of the individual head-on-body pairings within each camp are scholarly readings, so trust the sides more than any single face-to-figure match.

Now watch one device that runs through the whole picture, because it is Höch’s sharpest tool. Again and again, a cut-out dancer’s or performer’s body carries the head of a serious man. The effect is instant deflation: take a general or a politician and stick his head on a leaping chorus girl, and his authority simply drains out of him. Scholars identify, among these swaps, the body of the celebrated dancer Niddy Impekoven juggling or balancing the head of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, and read the ballerina Anna Pavlova and the film stars Pola Negri and Asta Nielsen among the cut-up performers, all of them aligned on the Dada side. (The head-swapping is plain on the work; the specific name-to-figure matches are partly inferential, so hold the names loosely.) Through the whole thing run gears, ball bearings, and wheels, cut from machine catalogues, the cogs of the modern industrial world threaded between the people like the teeth of the city itself.